knowledge

Education as a Path of Defense:
Arming the world with knowledge
-by Suzy Marselis

Could there be a war that doesn’t know defeated man? A peaceful fight, in which we all would win? Should that not be the only war we fight?

Wars are fought today, all around the world. Wars with winners and losers, but in the end even the winners lose so many. How to fight a war, how to live a life, how to change the mindset of the fighters, to a mindset of a peaceful battle?

Awareness is the key; creating the consciousness in humanity, for what is happening all around us, that for which everyone closes their eyes. We all live on the same planet, and there is only one earth, only one place we can live. As humanity, we all want to feel good, we want to feel at peace, we want to feel loved and we want to live without fear. But all around us, people are sad, being scared of the future, of their neighbors, for a paycheck that did not come in. So naturally, we want to defend ourselves and in history we chose often do to so with weapons. Weapons are very effective in ruining the opponent. But what is left after a war fought with weapons? A degraded land, families
ripped apart, societies broken, and even the winners turn out to have suffered great losses.

It is time to shift the mind, for once and for always. History has already shown that there is one way of defense that is harmless and actually beneficial for all parties: Education. Education starts when a problem, that seems to be unsolvable, is faced by making the ignorant knowledgeable. In a time where globalization is as prevalent as today, it is increasingly important to work together to fight the inequalities in the world. Only when we join our forces, in all that we have learned from the
past, we will be able to prevent the same from happening in the future.

We have so many past experiences and there is so much data available about humankind as a whole, but still we fail to learn fully from these experiences. Remember; how the native Americans were killed by the Europeans? And remember that the same thing happened to the natives of Australia? And to the natives of Latin America? How can we have let lives and entire cultures be lost over and over again? Remember how humans cut down most natural forest in Western Europe? Remember how they did the same to North America? And yet the western world is blaming the
Africans and Asians for cutting down their forest? We have no right to blame them. The only right we have is to share our past experiences and teach those that are ignorant and uninformed, by helping each other instead of blaming each other, by sharing the planet instead of trying to take as much for ourselves as we can.

With the vast amount of information available and the current technological infrastructure, it is becoming increasingly easy to spread knowledge around the world. Access to information and education should be a global human right, so that awareness can be created through educating the people and mindsets can be shifted. With education, people can actually help people and humanity can fight the war to live in peace on a healthy planet in which everyone wins.